Re: FrameMaker question - literate formatting

Subject: Re: FrameMaker question - literate formatting
From: slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 08:00:25 -0700


Hi Koray -

The short answer is, no, I don't think it can all be done automatically
via mapping tables. I believe you could do it reasonably simply through a
series of find/replace steps. You can also save a lot of time by buying a
plug-in.


If I understand correctly you'd like to have the sample code in an italic
font to make it stand out from other text--this would be a paragraph tag
called, say, Code. In the code samples, reserved words would be bold and
not italic--for this you'd have a character tag called Reserved.

> - format all non-reserved words and non-operator symbols as italic: again,
> the operator symbols must be defined beforehand.

First I'd go through the document highlighting each block of code and
applying the Code P-tag. Do the first one manually--highlight the block
then click on Code in the Paragraph Catalog. Then click in one of the
lines that you just formatted and select Edit > Copy Special > Paragraph
Format. This copies the Code format to the clipboard.

If the start of each code sample has a unique string in it you can use
Find to find the start of the next block, then Change: By pasting. Because
the clipboard contains the name of the Code P-tag, "Change: By pasting"
applies the Code tag to the highlighted text while leaving the text
unchanged.

> - format certain words (i.e. reserved words of the programming language) as
> bold: this means those reserved words need be fed to FM.

You could do this manually (one Find/Change for each word) but it would be
very tedious if there are many words. I can think of four options to speed
things up:

1. If you are running Frame on UNIX you can create a macro (or on a Mac,
an Applescript) to copy the Reserved C-tag, find each word in the list,
then do Change: By pasting.

If you have Frame on Windows:

2. You can buy the FrameScript plug-in (http://www.framescript.com/) and
create a script to do the same as in 1.

3. You can (I think) use the "Find/Change by Configuration" tool from the
FrameMaker Toolbox by Systec GmbH
(http://www.systec-gmbh.com/en/sites/downloads_tk.htm)

> - replace certain operators with certain variants in the typeface that
> appear more legible - e.g. a minus sign ['-'; ANSI 45] with em dash ['-';
> ANSI 151]: this too requires a mapping table.

You can do this directly in the Find/Change dialog box. Find the minus
sign formatted as italic; Change to Text: \m

\m represents an em dash (though maybe an en dash would be better in a
code sample? If so, do Change to Text: \= )

Hope this helps. If you have any more questions let us know.

Regards

Stuart Burnfield

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